Stages of locomotion: The space and time of railway travel in modern European and American theater

Over a century after railway travel began to change the ways in which communities, identities, and space interacted, certain influential playwrights and directors explored the theater's relationship to space and time by staging railway travel. Theater studies has analyzed how technological innovations such as film, television, and the internet have refrained the ontological status of performance, but the role of modern transportation in theatrical space remains under-theorized. Breakthroughs from futurism's first manifestos to epic theater's first production to use the treadmill utilized railway perception to investigate a particularly prescient relationship among history, technology, and motion. By analyzing theatrical representations of railway travel, this dissertation argues that modern theater's perceptual, historical, and social productions of space are deeply informed by modern locomotion.;Avant-garde theater's direct sensory engagement with locomotive space and time interacted in several important ways with theater's own physical productions of space, precisely because railway perception provided theater a new way to combine the stillness of a stage with the motion of travel. The discrepancy between what the stage's conventional limits allowed and what locomotion called for its theatrical expressions to simulate forced those theatrical expressions to challenge the stage's conventional limits. Over the course of the twentieth century, some of the most influential and experimental European and American playwrights, directors, and theorists - including Henrik Ibsen, F.T. Marinetti, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Erwin Piscator, Thornton Wilder, Amiri Baraka, Armand Gatti, and Robert Wilson - embraced modern locomotion as a way of revolutionizing theatrical space and its relationship to the world outside the theater.;In the chapters of this dissertation I offer close readings of plays that stage locomotion and contextualize those analyses within theoretical insights by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Michel de Certeau, and Marc Auge. Beneath a framework of phenomenological and cultural questions, I trace the changing perception of the railroad from the beginning of the twentieth century, when it represented the simultaneously thrilling and terrifying face of the future, indeed modernism itself, to the end, when it seemed in some theatrical accounts an obsolete space-time of modernism's linear teleology, haunted by its role in the Holocaust.